noAarchitecten, Sergison Bates architects and EM2N winners of the competition for the cultural centre Kanal in Brussels. The centre will be developed in partnership with the Centre Pompidou and the CIVA Foundation and is to be used in the future by CIVA and the MMCA. In their design ‘Kanal : une scène pour Bruxelles’ (A stage for Brussels) the team proposes a place of exchange with a large art museum and an architecture centre at its heart. The transformation will continue to bear witness to its earlier function as a place of production and exhibitions. Within the context of a precise response to the public urban spaces in front, a number of spaces in the interior will be radically transformed to create hybrid transitional areas. While also securing the place of the former Citroën Yser car factory in the memory of the city, the aim is, above all, that the Kanal cultural centre should lead the way to the city’s future. Continue reading noAarchitecten . Sergison Bates . EM2N

The town of Lo-Reninge, a rural and distinctly historical place, has a good 3000 inhabitants. Visually, it is dominated by buildings in the characteristic yellow brick made from local clay. The centre of the village has since the Middle Ages been bisected by a main street with the market square on its south side. This is the site of the former sixteenth-century convent which the town council recently acquired to use as a town hall. Continue reading noA

A 1913 dispatching warehouse for flax thread on the River Leie in Kortrijk will be the location for the renewed Flax Museum. This building is on ‘Overleie’, the other side of the river, not far from the city centre. This rather inconspicuous brick warehouse has a typical interior of cast-iron pillars and beams. In order to accommodate the requirements for the museum, an additional shed is to be built on the roof as a logical extension of the industrial construction. The grid of steel pillars is extended upwards and the beams are laid across them diagonally at varying heights. A series of ridge roofs creates four pointed gables which together make a crown-like storey on the building. It is to be clad in gold-coloured corrugated sheeting as an allusion to the ‘Golden River’, which derives from the golden gleam of the retted flax in the River Leie. This ‘Golden Rooftop’ also gives the museum a distinctive presence on its site on the other side of the river, so that it projects itself into the overall visual aspect of the city. Continue reading noAarchitecten